


let your lion heart cleave the waves

by song_of_staying



Series: wedding present [1]
Category: Prince of Silk and Thorns - Cherry Dare
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Sex In A Cave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:11:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5457659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/song_of_staying/pseuds/song_of_staying
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They're all alone. Alar, there are thousands of them, on the bottom of the pool, thousands of unborn dragons, and they need someone to take care for them.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	let your lion heart cleave the waves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jury](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jury/gifts).



> Dear figuline, thank you so much for your prompt! I hope you're having a joyous holiday season.

Alar waits for an hour in the passage where they'd agreed to meet. It takes him another hour to find Garin, following the route he had memorized, studying maps back in the village. He is keeping very, very calm.

Garin is sitting by a pool, curled up and half-naked, his lantern flickering beside him. He looks up at Alar and quickly says, “Sorry, I'm here, I'm not hurt.”

Alar kneels beside him. Garin's lips taste like salt and brimstone, and his hair feels strange and coarse under Alar's fingertips. He doesn't draw back from Alar's touch, but neither does he yield to it. There is a tension in him, and Alar doesn't know if it's terror or rage, or something else, and doesn't know how to ask.

“I'm not hurt,” Garin repeats, and his words are quiet, but they echo against the glittering walls of the cave. “I've found the eggs.” He points at the lake, oil-still and oil-dark. Alar leans toward it, without meaning to – Garin catches his elbow in a painful grip. “Don't go in the water.”

“What?”

“The eggs won't let you leave if you step in the water.”

“ _What_?”

“They're all alone. Alar, there are thousands of them, on the bottom of the pool, thousands of unborn dragons, and they need someone to take care of them.”

Alar had heard stories of dragons compelling mortals to do their bidding, but then, he'd heard the same stories about himself and his mother. He hadn't known. He reaches for Garin's hand, but Garin pulls away suddenly, rests his back against the cave wall. He looks pale, and Alar can feel a faint tremor in the hand still gripping his arm.

“We can go,” Garin says, looking aside, at the blank walls and away from the lake. “But not yet. I would like to stay a little longer, please.”

The cave is wide but low, and uneven in a treacherous way, but the edge of the pool is unnaturally smooth. Not even Alar's vision is sharp enough to see beyond the surface of the water.

“I think it was your blood,” Garin says, “that was the reason I could hear them. My arm burned when they called out to me. They want someone from the heavens, to warm them and help them leave their shells.”

Alar thinks he could probably pick Garin up, and drag him back into the sunlight. If it's a compulsion, Garin will be angry, but at least outside there is enough space for Garin to be angry – he can hit Alar, if he needs to, or they could fuck until his desire to return here ebbs away. They can find a priest, maybe.

“I just need to rest.” Garin exhales, and smiles at him weakly. “We can leave. But first, I want to go back and choose an egg for Alazne. I don't think they can affect us, outside the water – the stories said the mountain spring was made by Lucifer's tears.”

“The stories also said the dragons were all dead.”

Garin shakes his head, impatient.“They're here. Someone else will get them all someday. We just want one.”

Alar doesn't want anything that had the audacity to reach into Garin's mind. But the eggs had been his idea, chasing a story his mother had told him years ago.

“I'm going back into the water,” Garin repeats. “I escaped them once and I can do it again. But you - you must stay here. They need you, but they don't get to have you.”

He's speaking calmly, carefully, but the spark of possessive passion seems to relax him, and he reaches around Alar's shoulders. Alar draws nearer, kneeling between Garin's outstretched legs.

Garin responds to the kiss this time, still hesitant, but present. His hands move slowly across Alar's back, exploring and caressing and finally catching each other down at the base of Alar's spine.

“We could leave them here,” Alar tells him. “We could just go home. We'll buy Alazne's wedding present in Dimashq. Find her the perfect saddle, and a royal mount to go with it.”

Garin caresses Alar's hair. “You know that I still haven't found the right horse for her.”

“That doesn't mean you need to get her a dragon.”

“Alar. I love you. And I'm going back.”

Alar leans in for another kiss – when distracting Garin, subtlety is less important than persistence – but Garin pulls back.

“Not because the eggs need me,” he says, with finality. “But Alazne will be safer with a dragon. Her new wife's family is trying to kill her, and her own courtiers might be conspiring as well. She needs someone – something she can trust, and you can't be there with her.”

He leads the kiss this time, and Alar is pushed down on his back. Garin settles over him, and there is a true smile on his face now, familiar, joyous.

“We are going to fuck,” he tells Alar, and unbuttons him. “And then you will stay here, and I will come back to you.”

Garin is shirtless, he is soft and smooth in the flickering light, a glorious contrast to the roughness under Alar's back. He pins Alar's arms to his sides.

“Your breeches are still damp,” Alar says. “It's leaking onto my thigh.” It is an intimate sensation, but it's not pleasant.

“Should have told me to strip,” Garin says, almost as cheerful as usual.

“Strip!”

“Too late.”

Alar isn't sure what they're doing, but for now Garin seems content to pin him down, clothed as he is, and to kiss him breathless – truly breathless, as the air in the cave is stale and warm, and Alar can feel his chest ache with it.

Then Garin's kisses grow shorter and more careful. His rough lips leave a warm trail up Alar's cheek, over each eyebrow and down again, across his chin, across his throat. He lingers on Alar's collarbones. Garin does not bite – except on that one occasion, when he was specifically instructed to do so – but Alar feels the lightest brush of teeth. He tries to lose himself in the soft pressure of Garin's tongue.

Garin leans away slightly. Alar catches Garin's and brings it to his own mouth. There is an unfamiliar sulfuric tang on the skin, alongside the familiar grit of sweat and gravel, and Alar meticulously cleans Garin's palm with his tongue, then sucks each of his fingers. Garin laughs and reaches down, frees both of them of their breeches. He holds Alar's cock gently against his own.

Garin's strokes are firm and sure, slower than Alar would choose for himself, and Alar keeps perfectly still, and watches his lover get lost in the pleasure of friction.

Alar thinks, _it's been too long since we've fucked on the floor –_

Alar thinks, _next time I should just put the oil among my medicine – although, oh, I love doing it like this –_

Alar thinks, _what if he leaves me after he spends, what if he's enchanted even now, what if there is never a next time –_

Alar says, “Spend.”

Garin obeys, as he always does, a warm and perfect release of tension. Alar follows, and feels, for a moment, lighter. _We should do this in the sunlight._ For the moment, the warmth of their seed on his stomach feels right.

Garin rests his head on Alar's chest, and Alar caresses his hair. They inhale and exhale together, and the sound echoes back at them.

“I can still hear them,” Garin whispers against his breastbone.“They're still calling to me. They want you, want either of us.”

Alar stays calm, very calm.

“Do you need me to tie you down?” The rope they'd brought was not ideal – coarse and unclean sailor's rope, added merely as an afterthought. Alar had not paid due attention to their packing.

“No,” Garin breathes. He is caressing the scar on Alar's side, trailing soft fingertips across the sensitive rim and the unfeeling center. “I don't know. No. Let me try something?”

Alar makes a soft noise of assent, and lets Garin take his remaining clothes off. “No stains,” Garin promises, and rolls him so his face rests on the folded breeches. Alar's shirt, bundled up carefully, definitely stained, lies under his softened cock.

This time, instead of kisses, Garin rests his tongue on a sensitive spot on the back of Alar's neck. He trails down Alar's spine, then over his ribcage. Warm, sure hands reach to Alar's shoulders. The tremor in them is gone.

Garin massages his shoulders and leaves spirals of kisses across his shoulder blades. He works slowly, but unpredictably, crossing the sensitive lines of Alar's birthmark. It is too dim for Garin to see it, but he must know its shape by heart, because he traces along the outer lines of the wings, then works inwards, rubbing, scratching, licking in clever patterns.

It feels very slightly ridiculous, to be at the mercy of Garin's hands and tongue. Alar wants it to last forever.

Garin laps at the base of his spine, and his hands rest against Alar's hips, then slides them to cover Alar's ass. He is still, and his touch is light, and Alar makes sure to keep himself pliant in response.

Garin parts him, slowly, and kisses the back of Alar's thigh, brushes careful teeth across the mound of his buttock, licks soft, shallow circles inside him.

Alar thinks, _why haven't we done it this way before?_ and _would Garin taste like the lake now?_ and _if he told me to come, just from his tongue, could I do it?_

Garin squeezes his thighs, hard enough to leave a mark, but his mouth is steady and gentle. His rhythm is even, and seems to settle into Alar's flesh, and then bones. On occasion, Garin pulls back, breathing softly over the warm hole, and then eases back again. Alar loses track of time, stops waiting for anything to enter him more deeply. When Garin pulls away at last, Alar lifts his hips, and finds that he is hard. Slow, and almost disoriented, he turns to his side.

Garin looks at him, beautiful and elusive in the uneven light. He wipes his chin, and closes his eyes. He is hard as well, erection obvious under the dark material.

“I'm going now,” he says. “Where is the rope?”

“Are you tying me down?” Alar asks. He reaches for his own cock, then changes his mind and rests his hand on his hip instead.

Garin breathes out a laugh. “Would you like me to?”

“You would have to come back if you did.” Garin turns to him fully, and Alar shrugs. “You'd never leave me like that. Defenseless.”

“No,” Garin agrees, and cards his fingers through Alar's hair. “But I don't need to do that. I've learned your heartbeat now.”

Alar raises an eyebrow. “You've learned that years ago.”

“Yes, but I paid special attention to it just now – when you were excited, then when you relaxed. My body has copied its rhythm. I will be able to hear it from the distance.” He touches Alar's chest with a single fingertip. “It will be louder than the dragons' song, if I want it to be.”

Alar becomes too-aware of the beating in his chest. Garin says, “You'll stay here, won't you? Whatever happens. Nothing is going to happen.”

Alar nods.

Garin finds the rope in Alar's bag, and ties it, not at all well, to Alar's hand, letting it lie loosely across the palm. Alar will teach him to do it better, when he returns. Garin holds onto the other end. He breathes deeply, squeezes Alar's shoulder, and the sensation lingers as he stands up, disrobes – he is erect, he looks lean and powerful in the dancing light – and he walks toward the lake.

Alar closes his eyes, just for a moment, and kneels a careful distance from the water. He finds and starts counting his own heartbeat. If Garin – if the heartbeats become too many, or if the end of the rope floats back to the dark surface, Alar is going in after him, setting aside all unspoken promises.

But, for a while, Alar can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from The Breaking Light - Vienna Teng (ft. Alex Wong). I was so happy to discover this song, because it's beautiful and fits the story eerily well. 
> 
> But, for readers who like to know this sort of thing: my soundtrack for writing this was Under the Water - Carl Bailey.
> 
> Thank you to my beta readers, bigsunglasses and egelantier!


End file.
